Movie Reviews 'Learning To Drive' On Well-Traveled Roads 'His fluid personality tested and stole into the weak places of others until it found it could settle down to its own advantage.' Here's a characteristically sly little stealth-bomb that tells us all we need to know about a minor-but-significant meddler in the novel, who lands Florence in a heap of trouble. But they carry a dangerous edge when either gifted with too much power or cursed with too little, and she could distill a person's essence with devastating economy. Based on her own experience working in Suffolk bookshop, her characters may seem like textbook amiable eccentrics. Fitzgerald cultivated a particularly British appreciation for the futility of most human endeavor and a sharp eye for the destructive abuse of power and status.

If that sounds to you like a distended episode of the cozy British series Doc Martin, think again. The Bookshop's plot turns on all the locals who mobilize to thwart Florence Green, and a stalwart few who come to her defense. In 1978, embarking on a career at the ripe age of 58 that would earn her a raft of literary prizes, the British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald published a wonderfully tragicomic tale, short-listed for the Booker prize, about a 1950s middle-aged war widow who wakes up one day and decides to open a bookstore in her fog-bound East Anglian fishing village.

Florence (Emily Mortimer) unpacks her inventory in an adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald's 1978 novel The Bookshop.

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